WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - A new study suggests that oxytocin, often called the 'love hormone,' may help protect women from mood problems caused by sleep disruptions and hormone changes during postpartum and menopause.
To reach this conclusion, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School looked at how sleep interruptions and lower estrogen levels affect mood and oxytocin in healthy women before menopause.
They studied 38 women, who went through two 5-night stays in a sleep lab-once in their natural hormonal state and once after their estrogen was temporarily lowered. After two nights of good sleep, their sleep was interrupted for three nights to mimic the kind of sleep problems many women face during postpartum and menopause.
The researchers found that sleep disruption increased both mood problems and oxytocin levels. However, women who already had higher levels of oxytocin before their sleep was disturbed had fewer mood issues the next day.
In short, the study shows that broken sleep can affect emotional health, and that oxytocin might help reduce the negative impact.
'We found that oxytocin levels rise in response to stress-related sleep disruption, and that women with higher oxytocin levels before disrupted sleep experienced less mood disturbance the next day,' said Irene Gonsalvez, associate psychiatrist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and instructor at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Mass.
'These results point toward oxytocin as a potential biological buffer during periods of hormonal and emotional vulnerability.'
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